Professor ZHENG Yefu introduced the origin of his book Why Civilisation Is a Byproduct.

He introduced that many did not accept his ideas and argued that the Great Wall and the landing on the moon was great achievements of civilisations. How are they byproducts? He introduced six cases in his book to prove that civilisations are not the result of planning or intentions, such as marriage out of the family, the origin of words, agriculture, the invention of paper, woodblock printing, and movable type printing.

As Professor ZHANG Yefu stressed, civilisation is a result of a series of unintended interaction instead of planned design.

Mr. WANG Yan commented that the emergence of modern civilisation featured the arrogance of rationality. The contempt of knowledge and the false confidence in planning has led to disasters of mass scale. Civilisation is a very complicated thing that can be understand by rationality, but there’s also things unknown and unfathomable to human reasoning.

Dr. TIAN Fangmeng from Beijing Normal University thought Mr. ZHENG’s argument was built on shaky ground. He thought the six cases were illustrated well, but were insufficient to support the conclusion.